The manual states:
(Bold added by me for emphasis)
Keeping Up To Date
Paradox is deeply committed to its customers and in my experience their product support is almost unparalleled in the gaming industry. The developers read (and frequently participate in) the discussions on the public forums and will often implement some of the best player-requested features or enhancements post release. They also make minor tweaks or alterations to existing features and squish the occasional bug that had previously escaped detection.
Command, Leadership and Experience
The effectiveness of a force relies heavily on its previous combat experience and on the officers that you assign to your front-line commands. Each time a unit engages in battle, it will gain some valuable combat experience and over time and repeated conflict it will begin performing noticeably better. The resulting veteran units may become the backbone of your armed forces, but as they suffer casualties their losses will be replenished with green recruits which, not surprisingly, dilute their effectiveness.
Individual units may be instructed to act independently, but most often you will wish to group them into larger forces - often using a mixture of unit types to achieve the desired overall balance and combat effectiveness. Commanding larger numbers of units requires special leadership skills that are possessed by only a handful of people, so you will need to draw from a pool of your officers, assigning someone to lead each of your forces. Various officers will have different skills or areas of expertise, so selecting the right man for the job can be extremely beneficial. Each officer also has his own level of combat experience which will increase as you continue to employ him.
You may find that at some point you may wish to promote him to an even higher rank in your military, increasing the number of individual units he can command without incurring a penalty. Junior ranked officers tend to accumulate experience more rapidly than senior ones, however, so this will often prove to be something of a balancing act.
Very large-scale operations bring an added level of complexity to the overall command. It is one thing to issue orders to a collection of divisions all occupying the same general location, but another thing entirely to manage multiple army groups, whole armies, or even multiple armies assembled along a front. In such instances, you will likely need to establish special headquarters divisions: a unit unsuited for direct combat, but one that improves the overall supply efficiency of large numbers of forces and gives them a greater likelihood of achieving positive results.
When you are considering massive offensives or the defense of an entire front, this special division can have a dramatic effect on the overall success of your operations. In a larger sense, however, you will always be in ultimate control of your military and it will be up to you to plan your attacks and arrange for suitable defense of your territories.
AoD includes some handy features that make it as easy as possible to coordinate your forces and use them to maximum effect, and to assign long-term missions that your officers will then proceed to carry out unless you instruct them to do otherwise. Leadership and experience simply help to determine how effective they will be in fulfilling your orders.End of Abstract from manual.
AND ALL THIS “PURE GENIOUS and VISION” has been changed to a click of a button “to remove all leaders” according to v1.08 published changes.
Literally, where can I go and cry for the injustice done to Arsenal of Democracy?
And my comparison to RISK was precisely limited to "no leaders in RISK" versus "now nearly no leaders in 1.08 " (if you click the button). If you fail to see the comparison of "no leaders in one game" and "the diminishment of leaders as per free promotion" in v1.07 then you failed to see my analogy which makes the point that "LEADERS ARE ONE OF THE IMPORTANT ENHANCEMENTS" in this game, and the current trend of minimizing the thought and care that was needed to use them to maximum effect is not doing this game any favors.